


A Life Lived Well

by SimplexityJane



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 21:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1723709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky was the oldest of four. </p><p>Rebecca was the oldest of three. </p><p>Life went on even after someone died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Life Lived Well

**Author's Note:**

> This is really rough, but I'm going to publish it anyway. Any information in this fic will probably show up in other fics with the Barnes family, though, including names of Bucky's other siblings other than Rebecca. Part of this is inspired by a post on Tumblr about the Howling Commandos and their shared family/support group.
> 
> These are all personal headcanons. Comics, sadly, say nothing about Rebecca and I'm not sure why the MCU gave Bucky three siblings, but I accept gifts when they're given to me.

They give Rebecca Steve’s money.

Bucky’s too, but he was just a Sergeant, and his appearances didn’t get nearly as much money as Steve’s did. Mom’s dead, and Bucky was never getting married anyway—it makes sense that Steve would will the money to them, considering everything. The royalties from the movies find their way to her even after they both fall, and Rebecca’s hands stop shaking whenever she asks what the balance is.

She turns the money from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and Eli stops having to ask if they’re going to eat. He and Rachel join one, two, three clubs, and their brother is a dead American hero. Stark looks at her funny when she turns the money into a cool million and puts them both in private school.

She went to college for math, on a scholarship, and he’ll _remember_ that if he wants her to be anything other than a face that looks like her brother through a funhouse mirror.

There are men who want her now, the _rich_ sister of an American hero. She turns them down, every one, and sits with Jacques, Jim, Gabe, and Tim, who are all surprised that her brother wasn’t the only person in their family to learn more than three languages. They all learned from Mom, of course, Russian that feels more natural than English sometimes, and German used to be useful, but Rebecca picked Arabic when she realized exactly how many mathematicians had been Arabic, a sort of homage to them, but Rachel and Eli prefer Greek and French.

“Do you think he suffered?” she asks one night, tripping over the words with a tongue that’s weighed down with alcohol. Three heads turn away, _classified_ on the tips of their tongues, but Jacques takes her hand and shakes his head, mouth a thin white line.

“It was a fall. A thousand feet—it would have been painless.”

She would thank him, but she’s too busy crying. _He was supposed to come_ back _to us_ , she thinks, but she doesn’t scream it like she wants to.

Rebecca marries a man named Louis Proctor, an accountant she meets by chance, both reaching for the same Time issue. He was a soldier who drove a supply truck, and he doesn’t talk about the war. He doesn’t care that Rebecca is Rebecca _Barnes_ , just cares about the numbers they could argue about for hours (and do sometimes).  Their firstborn son is named Christopher, after his father, and their second is Steven James, after her brothers. They have a little girl the year Rachel gets scooped up by S.H.I.E.L.D., Mary Ruth.

“I think that’s enough,” Rebecca says once she wakes up to meet her, and Louis agrees.

Elizabeth is a surprise a decade later, in a time that Rebecca _hates_. She loves numbers but loves people more, something that makes her a better woman for stocks than her husband would be, but sometimes people can be _stupid_.

She isn’t part of the government, _will not be_ (not when they forgave the man who killed her brother and brought him into the fold, no, she’s not like Rachel, can’t forgive so easily), so her careful money management isn’t seen as communism even though it probably should be. She might not teach Lizzie Russian like Jimmy and Chris, and she will _never_ forgive Lenin and his ilk, but she doesn’t forget how her brother would talk about people starving and how maybe the government should do more than that. They’re New Deal, Mom got a job after Dad died—a _good job_ —and they didn’t starve. She won’t stop being New Deal even when it’s inconvenient.

They start going to church though, because God knows what she looks like, not saying anything about the Reds, or those Captain America comics (even though she’s making money off them too, won’t sell the rights to Steve for anything). Louis doesn’t give a damn about God, and Chris and Jimmy are both old enough to be skeptics, but Mary finds a peace in the Church that no Barnes has ever had. She talks about what God really means at the “family” barbecues, passionate and beautiful. Eli scoffs at her and asks why God made her uncle the war hero queer, and Mary rolls her eyes.

“What’s wrong with being queer?” she asks. “If it’s in your nature, why shouldn’t God be okay with it?"  

It’s such a different attitude than Rebecca’s mother had, even more different from the view most people _now_ have.

“Your daughter is so strange,” Louis says, and Rebecca smirks.

“Oh, when she’s a rebel she’s _my_ daughter?” she asks.

Mary becomes a non-denominational pastor in California, and Rebecca hopes she knows what she’s doing. Chris loves numbers like her and starts managing money too, and Jimmy becomes a _real_ doctor. Elizabeth marries a rich man and opens her own practice. She’s a doctor too, but it means something different for her. They have screaming arguments at family dinners sometimes, about psychology not being real, and Lizzie’s husband sips wine and doesn’t say anything—which makes him a keeper, even if no one is good enough for her little girl.

The nineties happens, the tech boom and subsequent crash. Rebecca, smart as she is, doesn’t see everything coming, and they only manage to break even. It’s better than so many others have it, and Rebecca invests in the _good_ companies too.

Eli dies of a heart attack. Rachel dies in suspicious circumstances that make Rebecca’s stomach clench. Stark dies. Tim and Jacques and Gabe die, and it’s her and Jim left as the originals at the family barbecues because Peggy has dementia (and it’s family now, with Chris and Jacques’s Jamie, Gabe’s granddaughter Stephanie and Eli’s granddaughter Maggie). Louis battles cancer once and wins, but the second time he asks her to make the pain stop.

“I could probably get married again,” she says. She’s past eighty and strong as a horse still. She’ll probably die in her sleep at some point. “But what’s the point?”

“A friend for the declining years?” Jim asks. He’s a decade older than she is and isn’t going to make it to 2005, but it’s a good life he’s had. Three kids, eight grandkids, and two great grandkids so far, along with six nieces and nephews and their own kids.

“I have _friends_ , Jim. I was thinking about hot sex.”

Emma, Mary’s late in life child, chokes on her chicken.

“Don’t tell me your mother never swears around you, kid,” she says, and Mary laughs. Her partner Tom is nice, a teddy bear of a man who served in Desert Storm and still gets nightmares sometimes. Her children did well, Rebecca thinks. Her _family_ has done well when it shouldn’t have, not really.

She’s still alive in 2011—she’s still alive for _Steve_.

Jim isn’t. She’s the last original left who still has the capacity to understand this, and Steve is still _so_ young. She can see the hints of that boy in him when he sits beside her, and the first thing she says to him is, “You were never small inside, were you?”

He smiles and ducks his head.

“You look good, Becky,” Steve says, and Rebecca arches a white eyebrow. She hasn’t looked _good_ for a few years, not to people as young as Steve, and he knows that.

The second thing she says to him is, “I had to rewrite my will, you know. I’m not going to begrudge my children their inheritance, and _I_ made that money into a real fortune, but some of it _does_ belong to you.” She waves a hand, dismissing his protests. “The rights to your own name, at least. I also calculated how much royalties from the movies were, adjusted for inflation—you’re not _as_ rich as we are, but you won’t have to work again.”

“Rebecca, I can’t--”

“No, _you_ can’t change my will, you’re right about that. You _will_ , however, take the money you earned, and what your name earned. Give it away, burn it, sell the rights to Disney— it’s yours. And I won’t die for another decade at least, so you have time to adjust.”

Steve flinches. Rebecca takes pills in the mornings and at night, and she doesn’t walk as much as she used to, but she doesn’t think she’ll die for a good while yet.

She doesn’t, either. The family doesn’t let her watch footage from the Attack of New York, but after that relatives in Chicago, then Tucson, then Malibu call her, say he’s with them. He somehow ends up in D.C., working for S.H.I.E.L.D., and Rebecca holds her tongue about the deals they made with Zola. It isn’t her place.

She makes it to 2014 and watches all her nightmares unfold. Matthew, Lizzie’s grandson, finds Rachel’s name in a list of targets taken out for being too curious about something called Project Winter Soldier.

It’s nothing she didn’t already know.

In January of 2015 she gets some disease, something attacking her, and she finds herself in a hospital. That’s when she sees Bucky again.

“I’m not dead yet,” she says, and Bucky, who has eyes like Tom’s were a decade ago, strokes her hair off her forehead. “You survived.”

“I did. I promised I’d come back for you, remember?” He’s crying.

She thinks the world is cruel to do this to them. He and Steve should have come home after the war—they would have given her the money to manage anyway, or she would have bullied them into it. They would have all grown old together, and maybe HYDRA wouldn’t have been able to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. with Captain America at the front. Their lives could have been _so good_.

Her life _was_ good, though, and they have a chance here and now.

“I love you,” she says. “Make an honest man of Steve now that you can, okay? Have—have a _good_ life. Don’t lose yourself.”

His hand is warm in hers, and he nods but doesn’t say anything.

They get one week. She doesn’t know that Sunday that that night she’ll fall asleep and never wake up. She does know that Bucky learned eight new languages wherever he was, and he teaches her to swear in all of them. He reminds her of her grandsons, the ones who chose service because some of their family _always_ chooses service.

He’s broken, and Rebecca can’t fix him.

It doesn’t feel like the failure it would have seventy years ago.


End file.
